Do you feel sad for people born today?
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
Children born today will have to kill other human beings to obtain clean water within their lifetime.
It really comes down to if you think that's an acceptable world to have kids in.
I weep for the youth personally.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yes, climate change, microplatics in brains and balls and mountain fresh water and pollution all around.
Oh and forget about ever owning your house except you inherit.
And all of it is man-made.
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Right, and that's all well and good, but not what I was talking about.
Okay? I fail to see the relevance of your comment then. Its about how we feel of the children born today. Not how you feel about having children. The children dont have to be your's. They're going to be born whether you approve or not. Giving them a reason to have hope is still a choice you can make.
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VERY specific people would have been better off born 20 years ago.
The vast majority of people would be better off today.
You can imagine in another 20 years that would be different, but almost everyone is better off today than they were 20 years ago, and they will be even better 20 years from now than today.
Specific groups may have a harder time in one time period or another, but society at large is getting better at the world scale over the long term. Hope still exists.
Climate change related disasters will only get worse over the long term, though.
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Maybe when it comes to social issues but when I read OPās post I think of climate change and how it seems to be worsening at an increasing pace.
Iām in my mid thirties and Iāve had a tough time the last few summers. Iām too hot to eat, causing nausea and reducing the amount of water I can drink without vomiting. Iām sure it puts a strain on my vital organs. I wonder how much itās taking off of my life expectancy already and how much worse it will get over the next decades.
I don't even live in a (historically) warm place.
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Even a cursory search shows the statement to be factual. Pick one
wrote last edited by [email protected]Are you living under a rock?
You don't need to google this shit...
There is a large land war in Europe with combined casualties likeling going to hit 2 million within a year. north Korea entered the war on Russian side.
Israel is exterminating Arabs in Gaza.
There is a big war in sudan
RWANDA invaded DRC.
Europe is re arming. China has been re arming and rattling saber for Taiwan.
India and Pakistan always doing their thing. Yemen is in chronic proxy war.
There is a proxy war in burma
Thailand is testing Cambonia
You repeating propaganda from 15 years ago.
Get educated.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
No I find that line of thinking cringe and a terminally online position
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I've never bought one, I always repair them. Spare parts are pretty easy to find near dumpsters, given how often people just throw them away..
wrote last edited by [email protected]Cool I'd rather go to the store and buy one than dumpster dive and spend hours of my time repairing something I can buy in 15m for $50. Hours of my time is far more valuable than the $50 I'd save dumpster diving. Must be nice to have a lot of free time to go dumpster diving to save a few bucks. I might have done that when I was broke in my 20s.
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I'm old enough and have seen enough to know that I've got it better than a lot of people from the present and past. I can't know for certain what this person has undergone in their 22 years, but because they use Lemmy I can assume they are a relatively stable, middle class person. I may be wrong about that. This person is privileged enough to even be able to type said comment here. To claim they know what a "broken world" looks like is naive in my opinion.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I'm old enough and have seen enough to know that I've got it better than a lot of people from the present and past.
I agree. But I also am old enough and have also seen enough to know I have it a lot worse than a lot of people from the present and past. I have known this at 27, at 22, and at 20. These are actually not contradictory statements.
but because they use Lemmy I can assume they are a relatively stable, middle class person
This is a pretty odd assumption. A middle class person to me would be someone who doesn't struggle to pay rent/bills, and is saving up for a property or is already paying a mortgage without extreme sacrifices. They own property, or in (nowadays) rare circumstances a productive business and at least some of their income thus isn't generated from wage labour.
This is of course a very conservative definition, but let's go with that:
An extremely lavish internet connection of half a gigabit down with no caps or limits here in the UK costs about Ā£30 or less a month and a phone or basic PC costs less than Ā£100 even for both, easily.
The council tax alone, before things like electricity, water exceeds that. My rent is 11 times that and is extremely cheap compared to living in the city, which I can only do because I WFH - a rarity.
A median downpayment on a house costs Ā£75,000 for a 30 years long mortgage, this is approximately twice the median, pre-tax income for full-time employees in the UK of Ā£37,430.
Housing price rises, and even rent/bill/cost of living rises have also outpaced both wage growth and even in many cases inflation. Purchasing power is on the whole - down.
Focusing on the only things that have gotten enormously cheap very much contrary to the general trend - like access to social media, internet and electronics is like looking at a really nice tree when the forest is on fire.
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You are born in the very very very best stretch the human race has ever known.
We have solutions for almost every problem which exists today.
Wars are at an historical low point.
Chances are good you've never been even experienced war first hand.
Housing is expensive, yes. But chances are you're reading this on a couch or bed in a home, heated (or cooled), with a working stove, light at night and a fridge with edibles in it. And lets not talk about your immediate almost unrestricted access to all of human knowledge.
That would be unbelievable, impossible even during 99.9% of human history. (Or somewhere near this figure)
You should stop doomscrolling and start reading the real human history.
All of human knowledge at your fingertips. And this is what you chose to distill from it.
Word. Just because America is on a downward slide everyone acting like these are the worst times ever. LOL. The people need some history classes.
When I was a kid, cancer was basically a death sentence. AIDS certainly was! Some of the tech I've experienced blows my mind. Wondering if my wife and I had finally caught COVID (we did š¤¬), so I busted out the free laboratory kit I got in the mail. That was work for a hospital lab, and you were going to wait a few days. Sliced the side of my finger off, and they grew it back. I could go on forever.
In the movie Armageddon (1998), talking about the age of the space station being 10-years old, "Most of us don't drive cars that old." A 10-yo car was trash, common knowledge. My truck is a 2004 and my wife's car is a 2014. Both run great. And I could go on for ages as to how much safer vehicles are. None of the things we take for granted like ABS, air bags, crumple zones, none of that existed when I was a kid. Hell, some cars didn't have safety glass!
People will next tell me that global warming is a new threat that will kill us all. Friends and neighbors, we already survived an ice age.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
wrote last edited by [email protected]Actually kind of jealous, because they will have AI just do healthcare on every single human, and they will have AI teachers and so on.
EDIT: Did I mention fucking UBI?
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I'm old enough and have seen enough to know that I've got it better than a lot of people from the present and past.
I agree. But I also am old enough and have also seen enough to know I have it a lot worse than a lot of people from the present and past. I have known this at 27, at 22, and at 20. These are actually not contradictory statements.
but because they use Lemmy I can assume they are a relatively stable, middle class person
This is a pretty odd assumption. A middle class person to me would be someone who doesn't struggle to pay rent/bills, and is saving up for a property or is already paying a mortgage without extreme sacrifices. They own property, or in (nowadays) rare circumstances a productive business and at least some of their income thus isn't generated from wage labour.
This is of course a very conservative definition, but let's go with that:
An extremely lavish internet connection of half a gigabit down with no caps or limits here in the UK costs about Ā£30 or less a month and a phone or basic PC costs less than Ā£100 even for both, easily.
The council tax alone, before things like electricity, water exceeds that. My rent is 11 times that and is extremely cheap compared to living in the city, which I can only do because I WFH - a rarity.
A median downpayment on a house costs Ā£75,000 for a 30 years long mortgage, this is approximately twice the median, pre-tax income for full-time employees in the UK of Ā£37,430.
Housing price rises, and even rent/bill/cost of living rises have also outpaced both wage growth and even in many cases inflation. Purchasing power is on the whole - down.
Focusing on the only things that have gotten enormously cheap very much contrary to the general trend - like access to social media, internet and electronics is like looking at a really nice tree when the forest is on fire.
Housing prices? That's your argument? That's your bleak outlook? Dude, up until relatively recently you couldn't have a baby without it dying or dying yourself. Common cold? Deceased. There are people alive today who are being murdered because their existence maddens someone and your argument is that your housing costs have gone up.
Get some perspective. Your life isn't that bad.
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Cool I'd rather go to the store and buy one than dumpster dive and spend hours of my time repairing something I can buy in 15m for $50. Hours of my time is far more valuable than the $50 I'd save dumpster diving. Must be nice to have a lot of free time to go dumpster diving to save a few bucks. I might have done that when I was broke in my 20s.
Meh, the dumpsters are within walking distance, and I'd say on average someone out at our apartments throws out a microwave around twice a month or so. As long as the keypad works, the typical issues I tend to find are either a blown fuse or shorted high voltage diode, both way cheaper than even the gas it takes to drive 8 miles to the nearest Walmart. And I usually have suitable parts in my parts bin anyways.
And between two microwaves, there's almost always enough good parts between the two to make one work. It takes me less time to fix most microwaves than it does to even drive to Walmart.
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Still an historical low point. Did you not check a single link I posted?
You don't need to google this shit...
NM, you admitted it.
ALL of that has been going on since WWII, and slowly dialing down. The Ukraine war is such a shock because it's so damned unusual.
I didn't say the world was at peace, but war and death is at an all-time low. Look at the casualties reported in the news today. We're stunned if 100 people get killed in a single attack. There were WWI and WWII battles you've never even heard of where 4,000 men were killed at once.
As to my education: I have 2 years of Advanced European History under my belt and 4 college credits to show for it. Not to pull the age card, but at 54 I've lived a fair bit of modern history. I'm guessing you weren't around when global thermonuclear war was hanging over our head as a day-to-day fact of life?
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
Yes I do. I am an anti-natalist because I care about people.
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All ye who enter abandon all hope
Seriously, you people are a bunch of cake eaters. "The future is scary and things are getting worse." It's always been scary, you've just been privileged enough for it not to be.
All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it.
Bro, people have it bad NOW. Life is and has always been suffering and struggle. Get out of your online bubble and go see some shit. Anyone here who says their life outlook looks bleak would have said the exact same shit 30 years ago or even 100 years ago.
Life is suffering no matter when.
Just read all of Vonnegut's works again. It's weird hearing him outline, from the 1940s onward, the same exact issues we have today. There are easily 300 passages I could quote here and claim as my own commentary on modern life. No one would blink.
āThe good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.ā
"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It aināt no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor."
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Still an historical low point. Did you not check a single link I posted?
You don't need to google this shit...
NM, you admitted it.
ALL of that has been going on since WWII, and slowly dialing down. The Ukraine war is such a shock because it's so damned unusual.
I didn't say the world was at peace, but war and death is at an all-time low. Look at the casualties reported in the news today. We're stunned if 100 people get killed in a single attack. There were WWI and WWII battles you've never even heard of where 4,000 men were killed at once.
As to my education: I have 2 years of Advanced European History under my belt and 4 college credits to show for it. Not to pull the age card, but at 54 I've lived a fair bit of modern history. I'm guessing you weren't around when global thermonuclear war was hanging over our head as a day-to-day fact of life?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ukraine war alone reserved the trend.
The only thing that comapres is korean war.
You larping old regime propaganda in earnest jfc
Quit being a boomer and look at the numbers.
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Just read all of Vonnegut's works again. It's weird hearing him outline, from the 1940s onward, the same exact issues we have today. There are easily 300 passages I could quote here and claim as my own commentary on modern life. No one would blink.
āThe good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.ā
"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It aināt no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor."
Suffering is not new. It's universal. To exist is to suffer. Even if we were to find an infinite source of energy and food, we would find a way to suffer.
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Having a child in 2025 is just plain selfish.
In the throes of the Great Depression, people were making babies.
In WWI and WWII, where thousands of men died every day, people were making babies.
In my time, the threat of planetary nuclear annihilation hung over our heads. I was made.
OP: This is all just so awful!
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And we're fighting this fight by breeding more wageslaves for the capitalists?
I don't mean to be as dramatic as this comes off, but I don't understand this logic. You don't work extra hard when you want to stick it to the rich, you don't work at all, i.e. go on strike. People not having kids would make sense as a strike of sorts.
Okay and how does people having children automatically force them into wage slavery? Its not a forgone conclusion by any means. Your kid could be the kid who picks up the pieces of capitalism and forges it into an equitable society. We just don't know. So why give in? Why give up on these children before they've truly had their chance? As I said in another comment, you might not have them but children will continue to be born regardless. Might as well foster some hope and kindness. Like Gandalf said, do the little things that keep the darkness at bay.
